It is years after my grandfather’s death when I receive a journalism grant to live and work in Vienna at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen—the Institute for Human Sciences—a place that sounds both grand and improbable and terribly European. I have vague thoughts of embracing the city as my own. My fellowship is named for Milena Jesenská, Kakfa’s lover, a journalist whose opposition to the Nazis landed her in prison after prison from 1939 until 1944, when, in Ravensbrück, her body finally succumbed to the years of deprivation.
My arrival in Vienna is unheralded. I know no one; my plan is completely inchoate, my German limited to the niceties of grandparents. I know nothing of the city after 1938. And really, I don’t even know the city of 1938; I know snippets, overheard fantasies; nightmares. I choose my apartment, at random, off Craigslist. It is not the best choice. When the taxi pulls up at the door, in front of a dark nineteenth-century building in the working-class twentieth district, far from the lights and music of downtown, the driver turns to me and says, “Perhaps you’ve made a mistake.” It seems a poor omen.
The woman who answers the door at Wallensteinstrasse 38/40 does not alleviate that concern. She is as cold as the street below, and remarks without cheer, or cheek, that I have brought more bags than things she owns. When I tell her I have a fellowship to write about insiders and outsiders in Europe—Muslims and Jews, immigrants—she murmurs noncommittally. Then she pauses, turns, and asks, almost sheepishly, “Are Jews Muslims?” to which I want to make a joke, but I realize she is serious, and so I try to carefully, briefly, explain the difference. Then she shows me to my spare, spartan room; she has neglected to tell me in advance that to reach my sleeping quarters I have to walk through the bathroom of her (always locked) office. I am in a hidden space. In the morning, after I wake, I discover I have literally been locked into this room accidentally. Panicked, I scream out my enormous fifth-floor window into the freezing air below, “Hilfe! Hausmeister!”—Help! Superintendent!—hysterically waving to the Turkish grocer across the street, to various strangers heading to work or running errands, until, after some thirty minutes that feel like hours, I am rescued by the Hausmeister. Freed, I walk the streets, lost, off kilter. I entertain my new colleagues again and again with the story of that night; I tell it as farce—“Hilfe! Hausmeister!” I’ll repeat over and over—though, really, I was terrified, convinced I would have to flee the city immediately.
I am thirty-one and still living in the fantasy spun by Karl. I ride the trams around the cold, marble, glorious Hapsburg architecture of the first district up to the still-poor tenements of the second district where he once lived and a handful of shtreimel-wearing ultra-Orthodox Jews now live again, warily, alongside the tattooed young and glamorous and foreigners. I meander through the city—it feels old, the demographic average skewing higher, it feels, than sixty, with few baby strollers—and I walk where he walked, attend the opera he loved, squat in the back at the Musikverein with my three-euro standing ticket, sit in the Staatsoper with a cheap ticket and obscured views, gleaning the nearly free music, as he once did. I sit, alone, in the new restaurants nestled in the Museumsquartier. I photograph everything I see and then paw through piles of old photographs in the sprawling Saturday flea market near Kettenbrückengasse; I pick through the images sent home from fathers at war in 1941, men on the wrong side, I can’t help thinking, as I look at their Wehrmacht uniforms, their arms slung casually around each other, their beaming faces.
And then, somehow, between the music and the art and the coffees obsessively accompanied with glasses of water, between the streets of the first district, the perfect apricot tarts at Julius Meinl, a food emporium of spices and high-end gastronomy, I, too, start to fall in love with Vienna, enjoy its gray skies and dour ways, carve a space for myself among those people who can’t muster even a guten Morgen in my chilly, decrepit building, become a regular at certain stalls in the never-ending open market, the Naschmarkt, with its multilingual hawkers and gorgeous food.
It comes in part, this falling for Vienna, because I love, love, love everyone at my Institute. They are Germans and Austrians, Norwegians and Canadians. We go out drinking night after night, in clubs and bars tucked into the archways of the Otto Wagner–designed U-Bahn stations of the Gürtel, the “belt” that hugs the city’s outer ring, with the elevated trains rushing above our heads. We flirt and dance, we sit in lectures with a relentless series of smart speakers, philosophers and historians and sociologists. We are in love with our lives and our luck; money for nothing; money to sit and think and write. I have a small office in the Institute’s building that faces the Donaukanal. I am giddy with lack of sleep and intellectual pretention. My grandfather, I think, would have been proud. In fact, in part, I wonder if I am performing for him, or his memory, when I take the train to Budapest in the snow, when I fly to Paris for a week of reporting, when I walk the streets of Vienna, alone. I have conversations with him in my head; I long to introduce to him my adult self, long to be able to say I am following his model, loving his city.
I’ve had this feeling before, this sense of performing to his memory. It was in Paris, at the end of my twenties, a different fellowship. An acquaintance introduced me to Jean-Marc Dreyfus, a young historian with a bald pate and an impish mien, who, with sociologist Sarah Gensburger, had just finished an extraordinary book about three forgotten slave labor camps in the heart of the City of Light. One night, over dinner, he explained: The Gestapo wanted not just to eradicate the people who had been sent away, but to erase them, to blot out all memory of these Jews and ensure that no one could reconstruct their lives going forward. Each camp, tasked with the gruesome responsibility of sorting and redistributing all the useful material goods of the Jews being sent to their deaths, and burning their personal belongings, had been fully absorbed back into the city and then, eerily, themselves forgotten. The task of erasing, of wiping clean the histories of those who had been here, had been remarkably, horrifyingly, successful.
I returned to Paris again six months after I first learned the story and sought out for myself each camp—Lévitan was now a gorgeous advertising agency building in the tenth arrondissement; Bassano was now an haute-couture atelier near the Champs-Élysées; Austerlitz had been housed alongside the eponymous train station (and is alluded to in the book by W. G. Sebald)—now it was a massive construction site—and listened to the stories of those who had been forced to sort through the detritus of the deported. Dreyfus’s discovery asked a question I had never thought to ask and now contemplated endlessly: What happened to the goods of regular people, the Sarah Wildmans, if you will, who were deported? Not wealthy, not poor; Jews who didn’t own great art but certainly had a home filled with the appurtenances of modern living: A dining room table and chairs. Beds. China. Cutlery. Notebooks. Photos. Clothing. Cribs. All gone.
The survivors of these Paris camps all had lived out the war under duress, but protected—most were married to non-Jews, a class of Jew that, oddly, stymied the Nazi machine, and so were set aside for later—and when they discovered the truth of the other camps, the death camps of the east, they settled down to live with a deep shame, a shame they shouldered as penance for that protection. That modesty about their own experience—that pudeur, as they called it—created a silence that they broke only at the very last moments of their lives. And yet within that pudeur there was also humanity. One man told me he was just twenty-four the year he spent in one of these camps; he was selected to help the Gestapo move the pianos stolen from deported Jews. And he would plot to meet his Catholic wife—not to escape, but for sex.
There was something about that story—that furtive sex, fast, under the pianos—that seemed so normal. So young. “Come to see me as a human, not as a Jew, as a man,” that survivor said. It was a comment that made me think of my grandfather. He, too, had been so young when he left. And what do we want most in life, really, especially as we start out? Intimacy, love. We can’t think
beyond that. Each man I interviewed—and they were all men—reminded me, in some way, of my grandfather. I missed him, terribly.
That hollow sense of loss follows me to Vienna. Even as I fall in love with the obvious bits of this imperial city, the lush cliché of the Belvedere’s collection of Klimts, the Leopold’s Schieles (all those contested pieces of art that were exposed as former Jewish property), the exacting perfection of the café culture, the smart academics with whom I break bread, I am also, paradoxically, often lonelier than I have ever been, an intense, solitary aloneness, which creeps up on me, unexpectedly, nearly drowning me at night in my strange, empty room, a mattress on the floor, a board over two wood horses as a desk; with enormous double-paned windows that look out upon the electric wires of the tram and the turn-of-the-last-century spire of a building that advertises an ancient pharmacy—APOTHEKE—in gold block letters. A Jewish filmmaker, Mirjam Unger, born and raised at the edge of the tiny postwar Jewish community of the city, flatly sums up the problem: “Everyone is missing here.” She is right. It is a city of ghosts.
The truth is, as my new friends at the Institute admit to me, sometime late into our third enormous beer, or walking along the city’s inner Ring late at night, or in some deep conversation screamed over the beat of electronic music, Vienna, my grandfather’s rosy hagiography aside, had a long history of anti-Semitism, one that had been embodied by its mayor, Dr. Karl Lueger, at the turn of the century. Lueger—whose tenure ran from 1897 to 1910 and whose name, until 2012, graced the Ring itself, much to the shame of my liberal Austrian (young) friends—ran on a platform of political, populist, purposeful anti-Semitism, a new institutionalization of Jew hatred, a political ethnic stirring that had not yet been directed in such a way before he assumed power.
His policies didn’t stop Jews from flooding the city. The Jewish population grew exponentially from the middle of the nineteenth century onward; by 1923, Jews numbered some 200,000 out of 2 million. More than half the city’s doctors were Jews (a fact that decimated the city’s hospitals after Hitler made ethnicity a prerequisite for remaining in the medical profession). By the early 1930s, Jewish lawyers outnumbered their Christian counterparts; Jews also numbered among many artists and journalists of the city, though the majority of them were small shop and business owners.
There were two conflicting impressions of Jews in the prewar period: both come, as do all stereotypes, with some degree of veracity and some degree of falsity: that Jews were penniless scroungers off the welfare state (that image came from the influx of Ostjuden—Eastern Jews—who fed into the city out of Galicia during and after World War I and were often impoverished)—and that Jews controlled large amounts of money, like the Ephrussi banking family, whose palace on the Ringstrasse, the city’s grand circular boulevard with glorious statues and figurines on the tops of buildings, where trams run back and forth clicking and sighing on electronic tracks, was immortalized in Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes. But while Jews had entered into parts of Austrian society after Emancipation (the extension of citizenship and rights and freedom of movement to Jews, which took place in Austria-Hungary in the mid–nineteenth century, with the benevolence of Franz Joseph I, who didn’t hate Jews), anti-Semitism from the turn of the last century until the Anschluss had kept my brethren separate enough, had hardened these conflicting stereotypes, that it obscured the reality—most Jews weren’t terribly well off or terribly poor, but were middle- or lower-income, small business owners, or shunted, often, into the professions that were accessible and acceptable for Jews to enter.
One night, early on in my fellowship, Herwig, a Holocaust historian and a Fellow at my Institute, and his Polish girlfriend, Camilla, also an academic, invite me to dinner. I tell Herwig about my childish thrill at riding tramlines my grandfather might have been on, about my grandfather’s lifelong, undiminished love for Vienna. “Life in 1938 here would have been awful for him,” Herwig says, uncomfortably. “Actually, well before that.” I am caught perpetuating the same myth my grandfather liked to sell. I am selling it to myself, to them.
And yet I didn’t need to be told this. I know this to be true, I know how Cilli described the city after the Anschluss—as though every non-Jewish neighbor had been merely waiting, their Nazi uniforms pressed and hanging in armoires across the city, ready for the moment Hitler arrived. Unlike her brother, she was quick to describe the prominent men forced to scrub the street as crowds crushed in around them, jeering them on; she expressed the anxiety that rippled through the community. “I saw Nazis march and chant, ‘Jewish blood will be on the knife,’ and I knew it would be terrible,” she said. I have just not chosen to focus on this, yet. Just like my grandfather.
Midway through the meal, emboldened by half a bottle of wine, I ask Herwig why he’d chosen to focus his academic life on the Holocaust. “Well”—he clears his throat, adjusts his glasses—“I suppose it is because of my family. How should I put this . . .” His grandfather, he explains, was a translator for the Gestapo and, likely, participated in the major roundups of Jews in Prague. He doesn’t know for sure. He knows, simply, that his grandfather was a Nazi, and that the roundups of Prague required all in town to participate, that Gestapo agents weren’t exempted, and even if they were, why would his grandfather have been? He believed in the cause.
Like hundreds of thousands of other ethnic Germans born in Czechoslovakia, Herwig’s grandfather was expelled from his hometown after the war; he lived, unrepentant, angry at his own fate, into his nineties. And Herwig loved him, fiercely, but this history always hung in the room nearby, disturbed him, made him wonder how to relate to this grandfather. Herwig called it a stain on the family. I love Herwig for telling the story without apology, but at the same time I am at a loss as to what to do with it: Do Herwig and I owe each other something? It feels somehow too intimate, too exposed. I wake the next morning feeling like I have slept with someone wrong for me. I tell him that; it makes it worse.
Such moments contribute to my peculiar sense of self. I feel ghostly in Vienna—transparent, disconnected, unmoored—a feeling exacerbated by my insufficient German, and my very strange roommate, who is often shut behind closed doors. Telling anyone my family left the city in 1938 is an instant identifier. The next words are invariably, “Oh. Sorry.” Or “But everyone got out, right?”
I feel, suddenly, very visibly Jewish, which, counterintuitively, makes me push the point. At the Institute, they say, “You’re so American.” It is not a compliment. It means I am loud. I laugh louder, talk louder, dress louder. Speak of my identity in ways, I know better, that Europeans do not.
I walk through the eighteenth-century Augarten, thinking of Karl and Valy. They loved this park; her letters often return to their time there. It is easy to see why: enormously tall cypresslike trees line the path and it feels, vaguely, French; walls keep out the rest of the city. It was not far from where they both lived; it had space, their apartments did not. Plus, in the 1930s, the park didn’t yet have the enormous flak towers, stark and bold against the sky, that the Nazis erected in the later part of the war. Those are still there; they were too sturdy, too thick, to be blown up or torn down. In 1946, the year of my father’s birth, a group of children found their way inside one; there they discovered a cache of arms and set off a fantastic series of explosions, which terrifically damaged the interior but didn’t bring the building down. So the towers continue to stand, ominous and foreboding, marring the sky in this marvelous park otherwise known for a delicate porcelain factory that sits on its grounds and its neatly drawn paths. That mix of beauty with the sad and ugly seems, somehow, appropriate.
One afternoon, I walk through the Augarten with Herwig, and we talk about seduction. He persuades me to go on a ride in the nearby Prater amusement park; we pay to be strapped into a swing that pulls us four hundred feet in the air and then whips us around at thirty-five miles an hour. I agree, unthinkingly, even though I have a terrible fear of
being trapped. The city beneath us stretches out in each direction, but I can barely open my eyes in the wind. I panic and grip his hand tightly the entire five minutes we are airborne. How could I have agreed to do this? I wonder, breathlessly, upon our descent to earth. “Isn’t that the very nature of seduction?” he parries. It is the very way my grandfather and Valy had spoken to each other, and I find myself blushing, despite myself.
I search for my grandfather and Valy everywhere; take their path to school, go hear their Philharmonic, grasp at understanding the obsession with the city. I attend an event at a Gymnasium in the ninth district where they invite back old Jews and have the children sing songs they have memorized in Hebrew. Hashevaynu: “Return us to you, God, and we shall return. Renew us as in Days of Old.” It is a keening, mournful tune. Do they know what they are singing? It’s meant for God—in fact it is a line from the Tisha B’av service, Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of the Temple, and it has always felt an almost impudent request on our part—a request that God act first. Return to us so we can return to you.
But perhaps, I think as I listen, here in Vienna it has a double meaning. I vacillate, sitting on the floor of the old Gymnasium, between boredom and tears. The old Jews, alumni of the school, are asked to stand for applause. “Joseph . . . Escaped in 1938!” Ovation. Relief.
Hannah Lessing is there, that day in the ninth. I see her in the corner. A former banker, since the mid-1990s she has been the secretary-general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, responsible for the reparations payments to Jews who fled after the Anschluss. Glamorous, and Jewish, she is the daughter of Magnum photographer Erich Lessing, who fled the city himself, as a boy, in the 1930s and returned after the war though his own mother had been murdered in Auschwitz. Hannah stands there with her vibrant-beyond-nature sienna-colored hair; an enormous diamond-studded Star of David around her neck, glittering in the afternoon light. It is a purposeful, aggressive Fuck you to wear such a symbol here, where everyone pretends the state is secular and not Catholic. She made me cry in her office, once—though to be fair, she was weeping as well. She told me how she won restitution claims for lost Viennese daughters and sons, and she read me a thank-you letter she keeps, folded into fifteenths, in her wallet. Later I am told that this is her thing: she brings journalists in and makes them cry. It is successful, it is brutal; it is smart: we want to cry here.
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